Everyone is building for the GLP-1 customer. In Australia, you can't say so.

The numbers on GLP-1 use are large enough that every category adjacent to appearance is now paying attention, and they vary enough between sources that it pays to be deliberate about which one goes into a deck. Gallup surveyed 5,065 American adults between 28 May and 5 June this year and found 11% currently taking a GLP-1 for weight loss, with 15% having used one at some point. KFF's tracking poll puts current use at around 12% of adults, or roughly one in eight, with 18% having ever used one.

Higher figures circulate freely (23% from a KPMG survey, 18% from FTI Consulting) and they tend to come from smaller commercial panels, which matters when one of them turns up in a supplier's pitch deck without a source attached. Gallup and KFF are the two worth quoting, and worth naming when you quote them.

The Australian picture is different again, and this is where most of the imported commentary falls apart. Research led by UNSW Sydney, published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, estimates around half a million Australians are regularly using GLP-1 medicines. That is close to 2% of the adult population, or about one in fifty. Sales grew from 57,941 units in May 2020 to 496,875 in April 2025, and private access went from zero to 43.8% of total estimated use across that period.

So the American market sits at roughly one in nine adults while ours sits at roughly one in fifty. Anyone pitching an Australian brand a GLP-1 range on the strength of US penetration data is selling you somebody else's market.

The number worth sitting with is the private access one. Ozempic is PBS-subsidised here only for type 2 diabetes, and it is not TGA-approved for weight loss at all. The TGA has registered Mounjaro and Wegovy for weight management, and neither is PBS-subsidised for that indication, which means a large and growing share of Australian GLP-1 users are paying somewhere between $150 and $500 a month out of pocket.

That is a consumer who has already decided that changing their appearance is worth several hundred dollars a month of discretionary spend, indefinitely. Half a million of them is a smaller number than the American figure and a considerably more qualified one. Your clients' salons and clinics are already seeing these people in the chair, whether or not anybody in the room has named it.

Image Skincare has gone furthest and earliest. VOL.U.LIFT launched in 2025 as a GLP-1 4D Skin Rebound Complex, developed by plastic surgeon Marc Ronert, addressing deflation, deep wrinkles, dehydration, and density loss. It sold through medical and professional providers first, then extended into VOL.U.LIFT BODY this year for abdomen, arms, thighs, and buttocks. The detail that matters more than either launch is that Image now runs "GLP-1 Skin" as a standing concern category on its site, sitting alongside acne and pigmentation. They have stopped treating it as a launch and started treating it as a permanent skin concern, which is a much bigger commitment and a much bigger bet.

BondiBoost is the one our industry should be paying closest attention to, because it is ours. The Double Bay business launched a GLP-1 Companion Set for Hair Thinning and Hair Loss into Ulta in the United States at USD $92, built around Procapil and Redensyl. An Australian brand is selling explicitly GLP-1-branded product in America while being unable to market it that way at home.

Elsewhere, Nutrafol has built a dedicated GLP-1 education funnel that repositions existing products rather than launching new ones, which is the cheapest version of this play and probably the smartest for most brands. Ulta's chief executive Kecia Steelman has publicly named GLP-1 users as a demand driver for hair-loss and skin-elasticity products, which is retailer language for "this category has a buyer". WGSN has it as a top 2026 trend under the name Faux-zempic. Nestlé has moved on the same customer through nutrition and beauty-from-within.

GLP-1 receptor agonists are prescription-only medicines in Australia, and advertising prescription medicines to the public is prohibited under the Therapeutic Goods Act. The TGA has published specific guidance stating that advertising Ozempic and GLP-1 receptor agonists is prohibited.

The trap is in the next layer. The TGA's guidance on complying with those restrictions is explicit that an indirect reference, using something like "weight loss injection", is likely to be treated as a reference to a prescription medicine when viewed in context, and that this can hold even where no specific product or substance is named. Renaming the thing does not solve the problem, because the regulator is assessing what a consumer understands, not what you wrote.

The United Kingdom has already run this experiment for us. The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that "Weight Loss Injections", "Weight Loss Pen", "Obesity Treatment Jab", and the term "GLP-1" itself are all references to prescription-only medicines and are not permitted in consumer advertising. The MHRA now publishes monthly lists of companies that have amended their advertising after complaints, and those lists have been running since 2022.

Put plainly, the product architecture that works at Ulta does not travel. A consumer-facing Australian product with "GLP-1" in the name, or a consumer campaign built on the phrase, is a live compliance question rather than a clever positioning play. If one of your brands is being pitched a GLP-1 range by an overseas parent or a contract manufacturer, this is the question to ask before the artwork goes to print.

Advertising directed exclusively to health professionals is exempt from the prohibition on advertising prescription medicines, under section 42AA of the Act. That exemption covers medical practitioners, nurses, purchasing officers, practice managers, and others named in the section, and it holds only where people outside those groups cannot access the material.

That asymmetry is the whole opportunity for professional brands, and it is the reason this category will play out completely differently here than it has in American retail. A professional brand can educate its stockists on rapid weight loss and skin laxity in ways it cannot educate the end consumer. Trade education, clinic protocols, treatment-room training, and distributor communications sit inside the exemption when they are properly gated. A public Instagram post does not, and neither does an open trade webinar with a consumer-accessible registration page.

The brands that own this category in Australia will be the ones that arm the clinic rather than the ones that shout at the consumer, which is a rare instance of the regulation and the commercial logic pointing the same direction. The therapist is already having this conversation. She just has not been given anything to say.

Four things to get right before you move

Name the product for the skin, not for the drug. Loss of firmness, facial volume, crepey texture, and barrier fragility are all describable without invoking a medicine class. Image's four Ds are a useful model precisely because every one of them describes skin rather than a prescription.

Put the education in the professional channel and gate it properly. Salon and clinic teams need language for the client who raises it first, and that client will raise it first. The client names the medication and the therapist answers on the skin, which keeps everybody on the right side of the line.

Treat the therapeutic claims question as separate from the advertising one. A cosmetic product that positions itself as addressing a side effect of a medication is walking toward a therapeutic claim, and that is a different section of the Act with its own consequences.

Think hard about the recruitment message. AHPRA has already imposed conditions and issued cautions to practitioners over prescribing weight-loss injectables to patients with disordered eating. A brand campaign that reads as encouraging weight loss rather than supporting skin carries reputational exposure well past anything the TGA would fine you.

The demand is real and growing, and it is concentrated in exactly the cash-paying consumer the professional channel wants. The naming convention that built this category overseas will not survive contact with Australian law, and the professional channel holds an exemption the consumer channel does not. That combination is unusual, and brands that understand it early will have a considerable head start on the ones still waiting for a US parent to send through the artwork.